After Outside Pressure, Rebels in Congo Lay Down Their Arms

Congolese children played on a rebel tank on Tuesday near Kibumba, the site of heavy fighting between the army and rebels.

Pete Muller for The New York Times

By NICHOLAS KULISH

November 5, 2013

KIGALI, Rwanda — Col. Mamadou Moustafa stood at the front lines of the battle for eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, surveying his soldiers fighting to dislodge rebels from the surrounding hills.

“We are fighting because we want to overcome the humiliation of both the Congolese Army and the international community,” he said recently in a Congolese town. “We are ready to die.”

A little more than a week later, the army got its victory. On Tuesday, the rebels announced that they were laying down their arms for good, a major turnaround brought about by a rare combination of pressures from around the world, including a more aggressive approach to peacekeeping by the United Nations.

The rebel surrender offered new hope for a region where conflict — and the failed international attempts to stop it — has gone on for so many years that it has often come to seem unresolvable, even inevitable.

“In a region that has suffered so much, this is obviously a significant positive step in the right direction,” Russ Feingold, the United States special envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa, said at a news briefing.

Only a year ago, the rebels seized the provincial capital of Goma while the much-derided United Nations peacekeeping force, for years the largest and most expensive in the world, stood by and watched as the city was sacked.

Video On a dangerous journey from war-torn villages to a refugee camp, Congolese families are caught in the cross-fire.

But the stinging defeat helped bring about a change in strategy. On the battlefield, the United Nations Security Council tried something new, giving its peacekeepers orders to go on the offensive and hunt down the rebels, not just wait for civilians to come under threat, for the first time.

“If there is no peace, there is nothing to keep,” said the United Nations representative to Congo, Martin Kobler, expressing the philosophy behind the new United Nations intervention brigade.

On the diplomatic front, the United States, the European Union, Britain and other nations had already begun cutting aid to Rwanda — which has been accused of helping arm, coordinate and recruit fighters for the insurrection — in a move that appears to have shorn the rebels of badly needed support.

And within Congo itself, the embarrassing loss of a major city spurred the military to reorganize its ranks. It removed ineffective officers, raised morale with better equipment and more consistent pay, and quickly became a more effective fighting force that swept over the rebels.

“This is historic,” said Jason Stearns, an author, blogger and Congo expert. “This would be the first time since 1996 that the Congolese Army defeats a major armed group and that Rwanda has no armed ally in the eastern Congo.”

On Tuesday, the rebels, known as M23, announced that they were ending the 20-month rebellion that had brought renewed instability, uncertainty and conflict to the eastern part of Congo. After suffering a string of recent defeats, the group’s chairman, Bertrand Bisimwa, said that M23 had decided “to pursue by purely political means the search for solutions to the root causes which led to its creation.”

In a statement headlined “Declaration of the End of Rebellion,” Mr. Bisimwa said, “Commanders are requested to prepare the troops for the process of disarmament, demobilization and social reintegration.”

Congolese soldiers inspecting weapons abandoned by rebels at a former base in Rumangabo.

Pete Muller for The New York Times

Barely a year ago, M23 occupied Goma, a city of roughly one million people and a major commercial center in the eastern part of the country. The occupation was M23’s high-water mark as a force in the area, but the seizure of the city may have also sown the seeds of its undoing.

The United Nations, which had a significant number of peacekeeping troops in the city, soon authorized a new intervention brigade of 3,000 troops, with an aggressive new mandate. Likewise, Congo recalled dozens of officers to the capital, Kinshasa, streamlining an army often best known for corruption and human rights abuses.

The question is whether the Congolese military, supported by United Nations peacekeepers, can and will take on the dozens of other armed groups in the area, restoring order throughout the region.

The broad diplomatic pressure on Rwanda appears to have robbed the rebels of backing at a crucial moment. Last year, United Nations experts accused Rwanda and Uganda of being so central to the group’s operations that its de facto chain of command “culminates with the minister of defense of Rwanda.” The report came under intense criticism from Rwanda, but many nations, as well as the European Union, Rwanda’s largest donor, froze aid in response.

“The international pressure on Rwanda seems to have made a difference,” said Ida Sawyer, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “They will hopefully think twice before backing yet another abusive rebellion.”

M23 was weakened even before the most recent battles. The group — which formed when more than 1,000 former rebels who had been integrated into the Congolese Army mutinied, breaking away and naming themselves M23 after the date of a failed peace deal between the two sides, March 23, 2009 — was plagued by infighting and a rising tide of defections. In March, Bosco Ntaganda, a rebel general accused of massacring civilians and building an army of child soldiers, turned himself in to the American Embassy in Rwanda, asking to be sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Mr. Ntaganda, whose nom de guerre is the Terminator, commanded troops accused of killing more than 100 civilians in the Congolese town of Kiwanja five years ago, while United Nations troops hunkered down, unaware, in their nearby base.

Civilians scattered during a burst of machine gun fire last week as army troops advanced toward the eastern town of Bunagana.

Pete Muller for The New York Times

The circumstances in Kiwanja could not have been more different when the Congolese military and United Nations peacekeepers fought M23 rebels there last week. A reinforced company of South African infantry backed up by Tanzanian Special Forces, about 250 men in all, fanned out from their base and engaged in a two-hour firefight with the rebels.

Even when they were not fighting, their white armored vehicles stood in a line behind the Congolese forces, a very visible backup. The United Nations presence in population centers like Goma allowed the Congolese Army to move up more aggressively with little concern for a rear-guard counterattack.

It was a surprisingly successful first outing for the United Nation’s new offensive peacekeeping force, in a country where the mission has had numerous failures that raised questions about the effectiveness of the huge, expensive undertaking.

The United Nations force consists of nearly 19,000 military personnel. The annual cost has risen to close to $1.5 billion. But it was the arrival of the new, offensive-minded intervention brigade and its tough new Brazilian commander that changed the tenor of the mission.

Analysts said the victory would prove fleeting unless the government addressed the root causes that have led groups to take up arms. What had spurred on the M23 rebellion was the sense that the government was not living up to the promises made in the 2009 accord, particularly its treatment of rebels who had joined the military.

Ms. Sawyer of Human Rights Watch called the end of the rebellion a “significant development” for the people of the region and in particular those who lived under M23 occupation. “Yet huge challenges remain,” she said, “including to address the threats posed by numerous other armed groups in eastern Congo who have also committed horrific attacks on civilians, and to bring to justice those responsible for serious human rights abuses.”

Human rights groups say the ill-disciplined Congolese Army also had taken part in past violence, and in many instances perpetrators still need to be held accountable. But greater restraint by the military has been in evidence, an encouraging trend.

“Kinshasa should not become complacent,” Mr. Stearns said. “One victory does not mean peace, especially with dozens of armed groups left and with a national army that is still in disrepair.”